A blog site for the anthology, A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 edited by Mark Pirie; foreword by Don Neely (HeadworX Publishers, Wellington, New Zealand, 2010). The blog features reviews and commentary on the book as well as New Zealand cricket poetry, reviews of New Zealand cricket books and other related material. The book's cover is by UK cricket painter Jocelyn Galsworthy.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

I first came a cross Gary Langford’s name in the Arthur Baysting anthology, The Young New Zealand Poets (1973). He was one of the emerging young poets of the ’70s in New Zealand. He later moved from Christchurch to Australia working as an academic in writing programes at the University of Western Sydney. I kept track of his Australian-published work through the volumes I found in the Wellington City Library.

Recently, I’ve been re-reading his work. We have a number of his books in the Poetry Archive in Wellington, including his beautifully-produced first collection The Family. The Family (which includes old photos) as its title suggests looks at family members and includes mention of his grandfather, who was a cricketer in the poem ‘The Silver Brooch’:

A small house, stoking the furnace

on mornings when the room creaked

with frost, white lashes over

The macrocarpa hedge. Voices fluttered

In her skull, cold, sniffing.

He was apart, forgiven. She nagged,

he drank, she cooked stews and

dumplings, he became a life member

of the Working Men’s Club.

Pedalling home on their tenth

anniversary, he gave her a silver

brooch with MOTHER cut

into it in gold.

During the summer he’d sit under

the apple tree eating fish and chips

and thinking cricket scores,

the days when he played

for the province, then stumble

inside and collapse in bed,

dribbling on the pillow.

She slept badly, things got her down,

growing fat like a dumpling

as she fussed and clucked and cooked

and knitted. His heart gave up

clogged by whisky, not knowing

how to open the windows and cry for help.

No-one knew what she really thought,

dust to ash, ash to dust, Pop became

a good husband.

Always bringing me

something home--did

you know he gave me

this brooch?

Clever with his hands--

he made all the furniture--and

good at sport--he

played for the province.

In a later book of Gary's poetry, Jesus the Galilee Hitchhiker, there is an update on this poem relating to the death of his grandmother:

Grandmother's Funeral Service

She outlived most of her children, or did she,
guardian of the first door,
as though this in itself was an adventure?
Each generation locked dentures,
marching side by side without a dream,
love becoming an empty section,
houses like people falling down,
too spare to escort the vacuum to another room.
She received a telegram from the Queen,
scorer of a maiden test century,
calling out in the night
which blew and grew underneath her eyelids,
given out by the Umpire of death,
old lady before wicket,
ordered to the far away pavilion,
exactly a run to the day
he tried to order me out,
head hit by wicket,
it's so poor when people argue,
I'll be back, I always win,
no matter how many times you slip through my fingers.
She was clutching a silver brooch
with MOTHER cut into it in gold,
calling for a man given out years ago,
he was offered a drink, that was enough,
the finger went up, he went down,
glass in hand, drunk before wicket.
She was never a drinker, took longer to sink her.
When she walked she walked hand in hand,
thinking of a younger man, a forgotten name,
and she was a young woman,
held in the loving arms of long ago.

This year, Steele Roberts published a substantial new book of Langford’s called Rainwoman & Snake. Langford is no longer an academic and is currently what he terms a ‘pure’ writer living between Melbourne and Christchurch. He is also a New Zealand co-ordinator for the Poetry Archive sound recordings project in England. In the second part of his new book, Snake, is a cricket poem.

Snake works around the theme of snakes in our lives and Langford gives a colourful and humourous vision as to how he thinks the snake appears in various sports, including football, cricket and swimming:

Sporting snakes are renowned for cheating.

They seduce umpires and referees with style.

We play for the sheer money of the game.

(‘Sport’)

In his cricket poem, the snake appears on the field in various guises as both ‘stump’ and ‘bat’, snakes, as Langford alludes, appear everywhere:

Post-script: Gary Langford writes: "Ginninderra Press, Adelaide, Australia, just did The Family Album this year too, which is my final sequence of my family poetry books: The Family (yes, Fragments Press did a beautiful job on that one), Four Ships and The Family Album which covers the period from those 2 books till now. Comic seriousness. Just as my novel Newlands was for my homeland, and why I wrote it. I have just written a sonnet called 'Percy's War' as I found my uncle's gravestone (he died when he came off a motorbike at 20, and is a chapter in Newlands) earlier this month. It was in a field and needed searching among the sheep who baa-ed at the idea of 'Percy's War' - not in our paddock, thank you. The Family Album is notable for using 3 of my paintings."

Monday, October 24, 2011

I'd like to congratulate the All Blacks and coach Graham Henry on a hard-fought but well deserved Rugby World Cup 2011 victory over France, 8-7.
It was a great final, contested to the very end, with a superb display by the French forward pack who put up a brave fight but McCaw and the All Black forwards were equal to the task.
Here's a triolet I wrote for Richie McCaw and his team:

I've written previously on New Zealand cricket fiction and now I've finally started to compile a bibliographical list of New Zealand cricket fiction and poetry that I will publish in the new HeadworX edition of Michael O'Leary's cricket novel Out of It (due for publication in early 2012) that I'm currently editing.
This bibliographical list will be updated as more fiction pieces come to hand, i.e. individual short stories. There are a few of these stories archived on the Tingling Catch blog, including stories by Tim Jones, Eva Burfield and John Sellwood. I'd like to thank Rob Franks whose bibliography Kiwi Cricket Pages (c2006) provided me with the skeleton to work from (an acknowledgement to him below):

List of New Zealand cricket fiction and poetry by Mark Pirie [work in progress]

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A friend and book collector Rowan Gibbs recently sent me a photo of a poem he found inside a copy of the great Australian cricketer George Giffen’s book With Bat and Ball (1898).

Giffen (1859-1927) was once referred to as the “WG Grace of Australia” (Wisden Obituary) and his career span was 1877-1904. His exploits on the 1886 tour of England are best known, more so than the 1893 tour mentioned in this poem. As the poem states he continued to rack up huge scores at the time for South Australia despite not living up to expectations on the 1893 England tour. In 1894, near the time of this poem, he was ‘All-Round Cricketer of the Year’ in Wisden.

Rowan says: ‘This copy has pasted on the endpaper a clipping of a poem ‘To George Giffen’ (possibly from The [Sydney] Bulletin) signed “CECIL W PIERCE SOMERSET, The Snowy River, near Mt.Kosciusko, January 14, 1894”. However from a letter in The South Australian Register 1894 this seems to be an error for Cecil W Pierce, of Somerset, S.A.”

I just received the following media release about the Cricket Poetry Award 2011. Congratulations to the winner Cecilia White, her poem is included below:

Media Release Friday, 7 October 2010

Over one hundred entries were received from the UK, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia for the Cricket Poetry Award competition in 2011.

The last four poems were selected and publicly read at the Cricket Art Prize opening event - Members Pavilion, Sydney Cricket Ground on October 6th.

The judges, Louise Wakeling and Amanda Shalala felt that a majority of the poems were of a very high standard and as such, they had a challenging time refining the collection down to twenty for the first public reading; then at the live readings night, the general public voted for the last four to be re-read at the Cricket Art Prize opening.

Louise and Amanda affirmed “…we chose our top twenty in terms of what worked for us as poetry; based on a skilled fusion of technical skills and conventions, including phonics, insights and emotion.”

‘Boxing Day Test’ by Cecilia White won the Cricket Poetry award for 2011.

Her poem powerfully describes the retrospective, compassionate thoughts and feelings we feel when watching a test match on television on a hot summers day…

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

A poem I found recently with cricket in it is by the late New Zealand poet Ronald Castle (1907-1984), a local Wellington chemist, writer and musician, who created a pharmacy museum in the 1970s. He was an old boy of WellingtonCollege.

Castle’s poem is an elegant evocation of school days at WellingtonCollege, where ‘On summery days on the green, white-flannelled cricketers batted’. As an old boy of the school, I very much enjoyed Castle’s poem.

About Me

Mark Pirie is an internationally published New Zealand poet, anthologist, literary critic, writer and publisher with a special interest in cricket poetry. In 2010 he edited and published 'A Tingling Catch': A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009. Mark's previous anthology of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry, co-edited with Tim Jones and published by IP, Brisbane, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work 2010. His publishing company is HeadworX Publishers: http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz As a publisher and author he has over 100 titles listed in the National Library of New Zealand. His website is www.markpirie.com His other interests are popular music. In 2010 he helped co-organise the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA). Web site: http://poetryarchivenz.wordpress.com